


flirting for geniuses

by screamlet



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Awkward Flirting, Banter, Clint Barton's Farm, Dialogue Heavy, F/M, Gen, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Team Dynamics, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 09:22:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4620057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/pseuds/screamlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Inspired by <a href="http://margotkim.tumblr.com/post/118090498456">this tumblr post</a> about Bruce and Natasha and how much more fun their dynamic could have been if the writing gave them a chance to be their horrible awkward selves.</p><p>thx friends/enablers ♥</p>
    </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this tumblr post](http://margotkim.tumblr.com/post/118090498456) about Bruce and Natasha and how much more fun their dynamic could have been if the writing gave them a chance to be their horrible awkward selves.
> 
> thx friends/enablers ♥

Most days, Natasha considered it a blessing that she rarely had to be in New York, and good luck that she didn’t have to be in Midtown, and the very best luck of all that she didn’t need to stop at the Avengers tower to prevent it from being sucked into a black hole or whatever.

Unfortunately, today wasn’t one of those days and she had to stop at the tower to stock up on some things—cash, mostly, and snacks for her two copilots in the car downstairs. Steve and Sam got along like a house she had set on fire: quickly, brilliantly, effectively, and wait where was that metaphor going?

In the tower’s shared Avengers’ rec space, she came out of the fridge with the leftovers from someone’s last stir fry attempt and supplies to sandwichify them at the kitchen island. In a minute, she could hear the elevator slowing just outside this floor, so if Tony had alarmed _anything_ to alert him to the presence of other Avengers, it was the goddamn fridge. In another minute, the doors slid open and she was joined by Tony, Rhodey, Bruce, and Sam and Steve, who had dragged the others into their argument about the best regional radio station.

“The answer is: why are any of you listening to the radio?” Tony asked. “Streaming music? I know that _just_ happened, Gramps—”

“Someone from SHIELD’s PR office, before all—all that went down,” Steve said with the saddest little wave of his hand. “They emailed me about making an official Captain America playlist on one of those and I’m just not a fan of them anymore. It’s irrational, I know, but—”

“Uh, fake username,” Tony said.

“Uh, real principles,” Steve said.

Sam cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “CIVIL WAR,” an effective end to pretty much any argument between those two particular idiots. 

Natasha glanced up and saw Bruce coming towards her and her snack materials. She leaned forward and put her arms around all the food, drawing it all a bit closer. “Back off, I claim these for an organization that’s absolutely not SHIELD.”

“Not hungry,” Bruce said. “Rhodey brought Domino’s. We might have some chicken flatbreads left.”

Natasha sighed and shook her head. “Tony finally broke him. I’ll miss you, Rhodey.”

“So, I was going to call you,” Bruce said to Natasha. “Until I was informed that you don’t have a phone.”

“Who told you that?” Natasha asked. She remembered Clint’s advice and backtracked quickly—something like _the keyword is WELCOMING, remember to be welcoming, be open to questions and sharing_ , which she would have wiped immediately had it come from anyone but Clint. “I mean, it’s true, like how I technically didn’t exist between the years of 2002 and 2009, but that doesn’t _mean_ anything.”

Bruce put his hands on the kitchen counter between them and drew her attention to them. “So, that? I’m going to just glide my little attention car right past that—” Yup, that was him _vrooming_ a hand down the counter as he spoke. Fingers extended, thumb up, so it was really more of a shark or a sailboat, _Bruce_ , do you _science_ with that kind of imprecision? 

“Vrooming right down the road around the whole being dead for seven years thing to say: Hill? Agent… Colonel… Captain… what is she? Is she just Hill? Is she one of those people?”

Natasha laughed to herself and leaned in, elbows on the counter. “So word on the SHIELD: VINTAGE BROADS EDITION goes that because it’s all so damn incestuous, _Maria_ always refers to Tony’s mom, and when Hill joined and climbed up to Level SubFury, no one called her Maria. She’s always been Just Hill.”

“And SHIELD’s only allowed to employ one person named Maria at any time?”

Natasha realized she was still leaning over the counter to whisper to Bruce and stood up straight, propelled back by a couple of realizations.

“Shit,” Natasha said. “It’s entirely possible Peggy Carter trolled me the only time she met me.”

“Who?” Bruce asked.

“STEVE,” Natasha yelled across the room. “Tell me if this is something Agent Carter would do.” She looked to Bruce before she walked away. “Technically I was dead at the time, so anything’s possible.”

“Right, gotta check on… all that,” Bruce said. 

Natasha left him looking down at his speedcarboat hands for probably longer than he should have. A moment later, Steve howled across the room, yelling, “SHE GOT YOU, SHE FUCKING GOT YOU. God bless her. I think I have asthma again.” Sam and Rhodey held each other and held up their phones to record Captain America hyperventilating against a pillar. 

“Smooth sailing, Banner,” Bruce said to himself before he went over to join Tony.

*

Natasha had a covert ops thing going with, as far as Bruce could tell, Steve, Sam, sometimes Tony, and a new guy named Scott who Tony was way too interested in because of someone not-there named Hope.

All of them (minus Hope) came in to the shared kitchen/rec room one day while Bruce was taking a break from some research. Tony shoved Scott into a stool across from Bruce and continued to the fridge while Scott looked around wildly and then to Bruce.

“Hi, I’m Scott,” he said.

Sam swooped in over Scott’s shoulder, and it felt weird to think of it as _swooping_ when he literally wore a pair of jet wings most of the time. “Who _are_ you?” Sam whispered, really close to Scott’s face. Scott stared at Bruce, then at Sam in his periphery. 

“...Scott… Lang?”

“I meant that in kind of an existential sense, marveling at the precious wide-eyed baby with a rap sheet deal of yours,” Sam said. “But I also meant it like this: _Secret identity, Scott_.”

“But he’s the Hulk,” Scott said. 

“Secret,” Sam whispered in Scott’s ear.

“Identity,” Steve whispered from Scott’s other ear, and Bruce smiled to himself when Scott screamed and fell off his stool.

“I’m Bruce,” Bruce called down to Scott on the floor.

“You’ll have to tell me later when I don’t have a concussion,” Scott said.

Tony reappeared with a green juice and an entire pita shoved into his mouth. He ruffled Bruce’s hair carelessly and went to stand over Scott without helping him up.

“You know I used to babysit Hope?” Tony asked. Crumbs rained down on Scott. 

“She was a baby?” Scott asked.

“I was eleven or twelve—some age when I was too old for a nanny and too young for a job,” Tony said. “She was like, two, and her parents came by my dad’s place to yell at my dad, so it was probably a Tuesday. Her mom literally shoved this baby at me and I did such a good job that she paid me under the table to watch her some afternoons.” Tony nodded at Bruce and said, “It ticked the old man off but good.”

“Ah, there’s the catch,” Bruce said. 

“The catch was money,” Tony said.

“Yeah,” Bruce said. “I guess it would’ve been hard to sell lemonade from inside your multimillion-dollar compound.”

“That, and Janet van Dyne never called me out on stealing her cigarettes.”

Natasha almost caught Bruce off guard when she appeared next to him with half of the megasandwich she made for herself. She chewed thoughtfully before she asked, “Are you planning to scrape him off the floor?”

“Me?” Bruce asked.

“He looks comfortable, I didn’t want to bother him,” Tony answered.

“Not you,” Natasha said to Bruce. She nudged his side and tried really, really hard to wink.

“I thought you could wink,” Bruce said. “You wink all the time. Don’t you? Don’t you wink? Did you sprain your wink?”

“Happens to everyone,” Natasha said. “We’ll try again later, okay? I’ll wink so good then.”

“No I was—wait—”

“I’m very pain,” Scott said from the floor, and that was enough for Tony to lean down and offer him a hand up so a second later he was standing at the counter again. “Tony, I’ll tell Hope you say hi.”

“Tell her it’s been what, thirty years? She’s still the meanest baby I’ve ever met,” Tony said.

“Still mean, for the record,” Scott replied. “In like, a super feminist way, where she doesn’t have feelings or empathy.”

Bruce watched as Natasha stared at Scott and took a seriously intimidating bite of her sandwich.

“That was a joke,” Scott said. “I make jokes. Please stop looking at me. I’m gonna go back to the floor now.”

*

Honestly, Natasha thought about Bruce a lot. Not like, _a lot_ a lot, not like _work_ a lot when she was trying to puzzle out a mark’s next move, but considering he was People, considering she didn’t need anything from him, considering he wasn’t a job, considering he wasn’t Tony Moneybags who needed a regular in-person ball-busting so he would keep bankrolling the Avengers and all these road trips she, Steve, and Sam were taking—

Considering he wasn’t, technically, anyone to her, she thought about him a lot. 

So from the backseat of the car Sam was driving and Steve was navigating, she texted Bruce: _This is a test of the non-essential text system. Please text YES to subscribe or NO to unsubscribe_.

“You’re quiet back there,” Sam said as they entered mile infinity on the road to the All Renovated, Slightly Different Avengers compound upstate. Westchester seemed a lot farther when they weren’t going to X-Men High or Sleepy Hollow, but rather to work. 

“I’m okay,” Natasha said.

“Are you texting someone about how boring we are?” Steve asked, his head slowly turning around to glance at her in the backseat. “Is it Clint? Are you ever going to tell us where he found that nice lady?”

“What nice lady?” Sam asked.

Natasha could see the way Steve’s eyes went from Relaxed Cap to GIANT SAUCERS FILLED WITH GOSSIP AND SHIT-TALKING when he realized Sam didn’t know about the Bartons. 

“Sam,” Steve gasped. He gently clutched at Sam’s shoulder and at the dashboard for support. “Clint is _married_.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Sam said.

“He has two kids and a baby,” Steve added. 

“How are you just telling me this now?” Sam asked.

“They own a farm,” Steve said.

Sam tightened his grip on the wheel and exhaled slowly. 

_“_ Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuckingkiddingmeyouarefucking KIDDING ME,” Sam said. “Tell me everything. Start from the beginning. Is the circus thing true?”

“I don’t _know_ everything!” Steve said. “And neither of them will tell me how they met, or how he _bought a farm_ , or what—Nat, what do they farm on the Barton Family Farm?”

“Beefcakes like you,” Natasha said. Her phone buzzed in her lap, ringing with Bruce’s name on the screen. She didn’t have a picture for him. She was failing at this, and also at actually picking up the phone. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Bruce said. “That wasn’t like. A real thing. Like a system thing? That was you?”

“I swear to god, this is the only time and place I’m too dry,” Natasha said.

“What the _fuck_?” Steve asked, his neck twisting fast enough to sprain something in Natasha’s neck from her reflexive backing-up cringe. 

“I have a dry sense of humor,” Natasha blurted out in Steve’s direction. 

“I—I figured?” Bruce said. “Wait, not that I—I don’t figure about that—I mean, I don’t _not_ figure about it, I just—you know, I was just at the computer creating figures for a paper I drafted, and I’ve definitely overused the word _figure_ today, so I’m going to stop using it completely.”

“Oh okay that’s interesting,” Natasha said. She reached lightning-fast between the seats and beaned Steve with his Sam’s Club bulk discount sack of pistachios. “What’s your paper on? I’m listening, I’m just talking really fast for other reasons, reasons that have nothing to do—” 

“NOT THE TWIZZLERS, I’M DRIVING HERE,” Sam said. “Put all the candy in my lap, right now, and no one’s touching it until we get to the compound. I SAID RIGHT NOW.”

“I was dead for 70 years,” Steve said. “I’m not giving up these Kit Kats.”

Natasha wrestled the Kit Kats out of Steve’s cleavage and threw them into Sam’s lap. 

“Important business, sorry about that,” Natasha said. 

“I noticed,” Bruce said. “But the answer’s yes. Subscribe. Yeah. Not because I—I don’t care what secret government-toppling you’re doing with Captains Handsome, that’s your stuff and I’m doing my stuff with Tony—”

“Holding his goatee back at the Daily Cryening?” Natasha asked. 

“Exactly,” Bruce said. “I’m glad you texted. I’m glad I called? Is that a weird thing to say? It’s weird, going from _well now we have to save the world_ to… I want to talk to you every day.”

“I’m going to say something and I’m only going to say it because Sam’s about to yell it in a second if I don’t,” Natasha said. “But I’m blushing. A lot. It’s gross.”

“Really? Why is that gross? Does it ooze when you do it?”

“What? Gross! No, it doesn’t _ooze_. Bruce! What kind of doctor are you!”

She looked at the Captains Handsome (TM) in the front seat: Steve had put his head down on the dashboard, his chest shaking with laughter, while Sam glanced in the rearview mirror and met her eyes. 

“I’m gonna miss our exit and you’re gonna tell us everything,” Sam said. “Everything, and maybe, just _maybe_ , I’ll forget about your oozing for the Love Hulk.”

“If you ever say that phrase again, I will cram you full of infinity gems and use you as a scepter,” Natasha said. A beat, and she added under her breath: “And I don’t _ooze_.”

Steve whipped around again and whispered, “Stop saying the word ooze!” 

“Ladies don’t ooze, they _glow_ ,” Sam said.

“You guys started it!” she whispered back. “I hate you _both_.”

“I started it,” Bruce said on his end. 

“Oh, you did,” Natasha said. “Well, don’t do that. Cut it out.”

“I’m glad I made you laugh,” Bruce said. “You make me laugh. It’s kind of the only reason I stick around for the debriefs. Well, and to find out who wants to kill me this month.”

“That’s a good reason but I’m glad I’m on top of it,” Natasha said. _Why couldn’t she talk?!_

She shot a pre-emptive glare at the peanut gallery: Sam stared straight ahead at the road while Steve dabbed at his eyes with the old man handkerchief he kept in his back pocket. 

“I’m hanging up now,” Natasha said. “Because we’re almost at a place and… that’s it. I have to go.”

“Right, yeah, you do, of course you do,” Bruce said. “And I have to finish my paper. And the figures.”

“Right, yeah, you do,” Natasha repeated because this part of her brain—the one where she liked someone and wanted to worm her way into their heart with no objective except to be there like a parasite glad to bask in the warmth of the human body _oh what the fucking fuck WHY_ —that part of her had shitty rusty hinges that were about to crumble if she kept the door open any longer. 

“So… text me later,” Bruce said.

“Right, later, bye.” 

She hung up before Bruce could say anything else. She buried the phone in the backseat and when she turned her head slightly, she saw that Steve was already watching her, eyes wide as anything, staring at her meaningfully. 

“So how did Clint meet his wife?” Steve asked.

“Son of a bitch,” Natasha said. 

“You’ll tell us about Bruce when you’re ready,” Sam said.

“Also Bruce makes sense,” Steve said. “Shared life experience and all that.”

“Shut up,” Natasha said. 

“Whereas Clint and a farm,” Steve continued.

“Has he considered converting it into a bed and breakfast?” Sam asked. “Because I’d like to see Clint make me breakfast. Does he have an in-house specialty toast-buttering technique or—”

“Could you drop me off at Xavier’s?” Natasha asked as she turned to glance out her window. “I have this sudden urge to become their surly librarian and never speak to another person again.”

*

Bruce was the last man in New York who wore a wristwatch and at 10:47 PM on a Saturday night, he understood why everyone stopped wearing them. 

See, Tony had repaired the Avengers’ tower penthouse so they could still use it for the occasional _haha what we’re not drinking to escape our Avenger-ness and the nightmare that is every waking day what are you talking about we’re just taking the air_ gatherings of the available Avengers-and-friends. Bruce had been outside on the restored deck with Natasha for 22 minutes and he couldn’t think of what someone would call this deck and he couldn’t stop thinking about when his minutes with her would be up. 

“What would you call this?” he asked Natasha.

“What?” she asked. 

“This thing we’re standing on,” Bruce said as he motioned around them. A glass balcony wrapped around the asymmetrical deck, the marble floors restored inside and out after Loki and friends cracked every inch of it, and there wasn’t even anything looming to fall on them, the way Tony usually liked his architecture. “I keep thinking of it as a deck, but it’s too fancy for a deck.” Bruce turned around and let himself live a little—he put his back to the glass balcony and propped his elbows up on the railing. 

“Ceiling patio?” he asked.

Natasha had to stare at him for a long moment before she said, “Roof deck.”

“Really?”

“It’s fancy when it’s a roof deck,” Natasha said. “Read a real estate listing sometime, Banner.”

 He raised his eyebrows at her. “You read real estate listings?”

Natasha polished off what was left of her drink and held her glass loosely by the stem. “We’ve both lived on the run at various points in our lives, but I’d bet one of my cash hoards that you’ve never appreciated the true value of a real estate listing.”

“Pun intended?” he asked.

“That wasn’t a pun,” she said. 

“Best real estate is a room you can rent from an old lady at the edge of town,” Bruce said.

“Are you nuts? That’s the first place someone would look for a white guy on the run from _anything_ , I don’t care if you do need the extra space for the other guy,” Natasha said. “Even if you don’t literally need a place to stay, even if you’re just passing through, real estate listings are your friends.” She started counting off reasons on her fingers. “Because they’re so distinctly local, you can pick up on regional dialect shifts in a non-native language. Second, if you _don’t_ know the language that well, you read enough of them and you can piece together the alphabet, abbreviations, counting system, because there’s such a limited lexicon of how you can describe _one room, tiny, horrible, cold, cheap_. And yet—!”

*

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Sam asked everyone inside the penthouse’s closed glass doors. 

If Bruce and Natasha looked back at the penthouse, they could see everyone gathered in the room in small groups near the glass doors, talking and laughing just like they had left them 30something minutes before. However, since they couldn’t hear them, they didn’t know that everyone was carefully turned at an angle towards the roof deck, using their various skills and expertise to read lips or divine what was going on out there. 

“I could ask JARVIS to—wait,” Tony sighed.

“No, you cannot,” Vision said. “I have seen from your work that FRIDAY is a perfectly competent replacement.”

“She’s not the _same_ ,” Tony said. 

“Is it that she isn’t the same, or that you should take my advice and seek therapy from someone other than Dr. Banner, who has zero degrees in psychiatry?” Vision asked.

“Hey,” Rhodey asked. “What _is_ Bruce a doctor of?”

The room went quiet. Vision, sweet as he was, took a moment to observe them smugly without helping. 

“How do _you_ not know?” Steve asked Tony. “You research with him!”

“Physics!” Tony shouted at him. “Ha! I remembered! I remembered and I didn’t have to ask JARVIS!”

"Which you couldn't," Vision reminded him.

“You literally live with him!” Steve replied.”You science with him every day!”

“And you’ve been hanging out with those kids at the compound too much,” Tony said. “Saying literally when—wait, I do live with him.”

“Motherfucker,” Steve sighed.

“CIVIL WAR,” Sam called out again.

“Why is that so effective?” Rhodey asked. “Like, I’m not questioning its use, I guess I’m just in awe of its power. It means so much _and_ so little.”

“Ours is not to question why,” Sam said. “Speaking of my original question: _what do you think Bruce and Natasha are talking about?_ ”

“I don’t know,” Steve said. “What do any of us talk about?”

“Fucking deep, Cap,” Sam said. “I knew I could come to you with the hard-hitting questions.”

Hill, Wanda, Scott and the illustrious Dr. Cho came out of the Room for Sane People of the penthouse and tried to catch up on the discussion. 

“We could turn the A.I.’s receptors and satellites on them,” Dr. Cho said.

“I could send some ants out there,” Scott said.

“Get those goddamn ants out of my house, Scott,” Tony said. “Helen, I like the satellite idea. Let’s—”

“No,” Steve said, and then he looked at Sam. “Shit. Barton reads lips.”

“Where the hell is Barton!” Sam said. “I emailed him about a weekend getaway at the farm and he still hasn’t emailed us to confirm!”

“Also the reading lips thing,” Rhodey said.

“Also the reading lips thing!” Sam said. Sam put an arm around Steve’s shoulders and pat his left boob gently. “You’re so smart, baby. Now go out there and find out what’s going on.”

“We’re not blowing this for Romanoff,” Steve said. 

“She’s not blowing much herself either,” Hill said, which cued a round of trash tv _OHHHHHHHHHH_ ’s around the room.

“Oh?” Vision asked.

“What?” Hill asked. “Banner’s cute, in that Professor Disheveled, fuck him in an alley behind a dive bar kind of way.”

“You lead a rich and interesting life,” Vision said. 

“Ants could’ve solved this,” Scott muttered. “Like five minutes ago.”

“Shit they’re coming back,” Rhodey said. “Everyone laugh at Tony!”

“I paid for this!” Tony whined.

And everyone did laugh, like for real.

Natasha opened the door and the room yelled out a casual, welcoming _HEYYYYYY_ at her and Bruce.

“What’s so funny that all of you laughed at the same time?” Natasha asked.

Everyone stared at her.

“You know,” Steve said. “The usual stuff. Just stuff. Stuff we talk about.”

Natasha stared at them and then she turned to Vision. “You.”

Vision stared at her. 

“Do you know,” Vision said. “I’m afraid I can’t recall the discussion.”

“The hell you can’t,” Natasha said before she warned him, “You’re gonna lose hammer privileges if you keep hanging out with this crowd.”

It didn’t escape anyone’s notice, the way Bruce reached down and tugged at the cuff of Natasha’s sleeve before attempting to fade into a wall in a room this crowded. It didn’t escape Natasha’s notice, either, even if she didn’t look in his direction to acknowledge it. 

“Thanks for the drinks, Stark,” Natasha said. “Nice ceiling patio. We’ll see you soon.”

“He has a curfew!” Tony shouted. “Don’t feed him after midnight! Romanoff if you break his heart I’ll—I’ll probably hold him while he cries and I won’t be very nice to you!”

The elevator doors closed on Natasha looking down at her nails and Bruce staring at Tony with a helpless _seriously, man, WHAT?_ expression, half-love, half-baffled, all disheveled.

“...well what now?” Rhodey asked. “They were so entertaining, and so hapless.” 

“Let’s call Thor on Vision’s forehead,” Tony said.

“Could you not?” Vision asked.

“Let’s find Steve a girlfriend!” Tony said.

“I’m good,” Steve said. 

“He’s good,” Sam said.

Hill grinned for a moment. “This just got interesting again,” she said. “Tell me more, tell me more, like did it happen in that car that’s a _rental_?”

“Party’s over, everyone!” Sam called out. “See you at the next war!”

“At least we didn’t steal it?” Steve asked Hill. "Steal a car, I mean. I didn't steal anything from you. Or Sam."

"Only my heart," Sam said. 

“Small fucking miracle, you also didn’t crash it during the great Kit Kat fight of last fucking week,” Hill said. 

“Did Natasha tell you that?” Steve asked.

“Ooh,” Tony whispered. “Grampsicle forgot we live in a surveillance state. He thought _the car_ was safe.”

“Okay, we’re gonna go before this gets any weirder,” Steve said. “Thanks for tonight, Tony.”

“Text him when Bruce gets in,” Sam said.

“What, no,” Steve said. “I don’t… need to know that.”

“We’ll talk at the next PTA bake sale,” Tony assured him. “Our kids are gonna look so good together at prom.”

“Aw, that’s actually cute,” Sam said to Steve. “Can you imagine Natasha with a corsage on her wrist? And happy?”

“I guess that’s Halloween settled,” Steve said. “Barring the end of the world.”

“Yeah, have a good night,” Tony said. “See you at the end of the world.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter two is a _deleted scene_!!!!!


	2. DELETED SCENE - THE SERUM

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bruce discovers an interview Steve did with SHIELD, post-defrosting, about the serum's formula and how it works.  
> (Cut from the main story because it didn't match the tone of the central story at all.)

Bruce wasn't listening to Thor's story. Instead, he left the couch silently, everyone else still listening to Thor, and headed to the kitchen to clear his head for a second. 

Thor was back to catch up, sort of; mother still dead, brother still dead, girlfriend still a realm away, father a little less of a dickhead which, to Thor, _felt_ suspicious? But there was other shit coming down the shit pipeline. Bruce would catch up later; right now, he had to step away and pretend to look for snacks in the cupboards. 

In all this time, somehow, they had all never talked about their pre-Avenger time. Not their lives, necessarily, everyone knew the basics of these less than basic people, but Bruce wondered—

He wondered if he was the only one who didn't miss who he was. He didn’t miss Dr. Bruce Banner. 

Not that he wasn't Dr. Banner anymore, but he wasn't Dr. Banner of Culver University anymore. He wasn't Bruce, Betty Ross's partner since college. 

God, he did not miss being that asshole, and he wasn't so naive as to think that he wasn't _still_ that asshole, down where the other guy lived. 

He had learned a lot from his research into the Avengers and SHIELD and the serum that had upended his life forever. He had read everyone’s files during his many, many, many hours of not talking to people. No hacking necessary; he had just looked it up (thanks, Natasha) and read everything about everyone. 

He found Steve’s files the most interesting, and that’s saying something when one of his teammates was a demigod whose home planet/realm had an atmosphere so transparent and fucked that photographs didn’t work on the surface. (Thor’s official description of Asgard: “It’s very nice. A temperate climate.”) 

That aside, Bruce’s favorite interview from Steve’s files involved the serum. Everyone involved, from Erskine to Howard Stark to the military officers who ok’d the project and watched Steve transform into Captain America, was terminally unavailable for comment, and here was Steve! Steve who could shed some light on the serum that changed his life, the serum that had only ever worked on him. Of course Bruce threw himself headfirst into that file, once he realized what it was. 

In the video, Steve’s offscreen interviewer began with the understatement: “We’ve seen the serum have adverse effects.”

“Yeah, his name was Red Skull,” Steve said. 

“Not only him—”

“I can’t tell you how it’s made,” Steve said. “Erskine never told me, never showed me a formula, never shared it with anyone, ever. I promise you that. It died with him. But it’s—it’s a strengthening serum, and it works by making everything it touches... _more_. It strengthens the good and the bad indiscriminately.”

The interviewer scoffed at Captain America. 

“I’m aware you don’t have a background in science, Captain Rogers, but surely you understand that there’s no morality in science.”

“The fuck did you just say to me?” Steve asked.

“Excuse me?”

“We’re talking about experiments performed in the age of Nazi doctors and you’re telling me there’s no morality in science? I found Bucky Barnes, my _best friend_ , in a POW camp, half out of his mind with fear, starvation, serums, experiments, muttering his service number like it was the only thing keeping him alive, and you’re sitting here telling me there’s no morality in—”

“That wasn’t science, that was torture.”

“That was torture in the name of science, and you should know the goddamn difference,” Steve said. “You think you can break the serum down into its elements and it won’t find an atom of good or bad, but that’s not what the serum does. The serum latches on to what’s _there_ , and if what’s there are chemicals that make someone angry? Abusive? A homicidal maniac? That’s what the serum will strengthen.” Steve glanced at the camera briefly and then looked back at the interviewer. “Pardon my fucking language. Do you have any more questions for me?”

In addition to heaping Bruce’s metaphorical plate with a giant serving of humble pie and newfound respect for Steve, it really… clarified where his own experiment had gone wrong. Where he had gone wrong. 

Before the accident, before Hulk, he was Dr. Bruce Banner, a total dick. He was obsessed with his research, with tenure and work politics, but those were his _good_ qualities. Those were things Betty could brag about to people when they were out at parties and she had to dig for one good thing about the guy standing next to her. If it hadn’t been for the Hulk, he and Betty would have ruined each other. He would have done his level best to exert some control on his worthless life, his worthless research, by going after Betty, always there and listening, always ready to push back and give him a fight. 

He wasn’t self-aware, before the Hulk. He was that asshole, the one who pushed his glasses further up his nose and chose his words carefully, going for the most precise comments pointed directly into people’s weakest spots. He was a scientist; his life was about precision, wasn’t it? People could be so stupid and if he wasn’t precise, people wouldn’t understand what he meant. _That_ was the raging fuckstick the serum had brought out into the world, made immortal and larger than life. If it hadn’t been for the Hulk, the only person in any danger from Bruce would have been Betty, and that was danger enough. 


End file.
